With the increased tensions between Iran and the U.S., there is a concern that Iran, or hackers working for Iran, may attempt cyber attacks against the U.S., especially government and critical infrastructure. In light of this, I feel I should put out a little reminder on how to keep yourself safe. Here are 4 simple tips to help you safeguard your computer and the information stored on it.

After using a trio of blackhole DNS servers on an Enterprise LAN, divided into three main subnets and having very little insight into what/who was querying what/where, we gave Pi-Hole a try. While it was originally, I think, developed for the Raspberry Pi running on a home network to block ads, we’ve found that it works quite well in the enterprise as well. An interesting discussion in the Pi-Hole forums helped us to resolve a couple of issues. But, in […]

I’ve just started playing around with Raspberry Pi and Arduino. I should be studying for my CCNA, but I need a break before I get burned out, besides, it’s a lot of fun. For the Raspberry Pi, I ordered a kit from Cana Kit, which came with a nice little reference card for the GPIO (General Purpose Input Output) pins on the board, but I found it to be a bit confusing. There are several others available online, but they […]

If you’ve ever used your cell phone to give your laptop an internet connection (a.k.a. tethering), then you know how valuable bandwidth is. Exceed that bandwidth and your facing additional charges for you cell phone plan. So how do you maximize your bandwidth? One of the simplest ways is to block ads on the sites that you visit.

I’ve been experimenting lately with the Elastic Stack, Elasticsearch, Logstash, and Kibana, from Elastic, for a few weeks now. I ran into a problem with Kibana running away and becoming unresponsive, so I decided to give it a try running the three in Docker containers. If you’re following the official documentation, getting Elasticsearch up and running properly is pretty straight forward, but not so much with Logstash and Kibana (they seem straight forward, but there’s a little bit missing from […]

YAML is seeing an increase in usage for configuration files. While this is good, there are a few things to watch out for. I will add to this list as I come across, or hear of, more things to watch out for. Indentation Matters (A LOT) Much like Python, indentation matters a lot in YAML. Best practice is to use spaces and not tabs, which to me is more of a pain than it needs to be. That being said, […]

We all know, or should know, that documentation is important. The question is how does one go about documenting I.T. infrastructure? There are so many different methods and so many different things to document that just getting started can be a daunting task. Several years ago I worked for a company that insisted, in no uncertain terms, that full documentation exists. They had a Word document that they used, which I recently learned was at least in part based on […]

If you have a MS Word document that has page numbers that are “misnumbered”, there is a simple solution. First a little background info and an example of what I’m talking about. MS Word numbers pages based on sections. So if you have more than one section in your document it can throw off you page numbering. For example, I have a document that currently consists of three sections. This is because one of the pages is in landscape mode […]